I'm down to about one Walmart trip per year. It may have been as many as 3 years since I've been inside Target. Kmart is a dusty memory. On my last Walmart trip, it is a shabby caricature of what I remember from the early 2000s (maybe even on up into 2011 or 2012. I can't be sure, but I believe aisles have been made wider so they could fit fewer shelves and keep those looking fuller. What fills them is the cheapest looking junk I have ever seen, and I had no favorable opinion of Walmart's goods to start with. Truly much of it looks like the sort of trinkety crap you would have found at flea markets and gas stations years ago. Target was (3 years ago) still worse, I think they do most of their ordering off of Temu.
If there is something I might prefer to not wait on Amazon for, I will not find it at Walmart even if I remember Walmart once carrying that product. This is without fail. Each new (rare) trip to Walmart reinforces the lesson.
I have never been fond of Walmart's grocery department. I suspect (long ago) that they were able to sell produce 1 cent cheaper than anyone else by buying the least-wanted, unsold inventory from agricultural distributors, and the quality always reflected that theory. I could buy strawberries from Walmart, buy them again from the local grocery chain 10 minutes later, put them in the fridge simultaneously. And the Walmart-bought produce was slimy the next day, the grocery store produce not (unless I stacked the Walmart clamshell on the grocery store one... cross-contamination).
Worse still, they have reduced their personnel to skeleton crews, all shifts. The stores tend to look like they were looted after hurricanes. I do not know how anyone shops at Walmart, and it scares me that if my circumstances were less agreeable I might be forced to shop there too. Walmart might aim for stealing marketshare from Dollar General as a growth strategy, the overlap must be nearly absolute.
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The mission of S3 Insights is to help customers understand what data they have and how their data is being used in order to recommend actions they can take on their data. As an engineer on the AWS S3 Insights team, you will write software to efficiently and accurately aggregate every event in S3, summarize and digest that data, and generate key insights for customers.
Here are a couple of the positions that I'm hiring for but please feel free to reach out to me (evan @ amazon . com) with any questions:
My first car was also a 914 that the father of a friend of mine had sitting in his garage. The transmission was shot (no first gear) and the suspension had given out but I bought it anyway for $800 and put about $2000 into fixing it.
It was a really fun car to drive although it also shared many of the same quirks as mentioned in this story.
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Alexa for Everyone is focused on making Alexa an indispensable part of the lives of people with disabilities, older customers, and family caregivers. We are a small team of engineers and product managers and we have an ambitious road map for the year.
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Please take a look at two of our open positions listed below or reach out to me (I'm the Hiring Manager) directly at evan@amazon.com
"I don’t recommend writing a press release at the start of your project, especially one like that."
So even though Doom was wildly successful and (according to Romero) was the most ambitious game development effort before or since, he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?
It's likely that the team worked so hard and achieved such success at least in part to the fact that they had a very clear goal for what they wanted to achieve and that they had publicly announced this goal.
Interestingly, writing a Press Release is the very first step of the "Working Backwards" product development process at Amazon and it is mandatory part of introducing any new product.
> (...) he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?
I think it doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. You might want to change the direction into something that is not only doable but _better_. Remember Quake? It was supposed to be something completely different, based on their plans [1].
Maybe it's just more specific to games? I feel like games require a lot of iteration of figuring out where the fun is and balancing that with other subjective elements; not too much grind, growing and increasing challenge through the game. Tech can come in and out of the game and a lot of the "fun" is built around that--your level design will be very different if you could look up/down or jump. Just like if you lighting/shadowing method changes it would affect things. This is probably controversial, but I think some games are just fine at 30fps while certain games do benefit from 60+fps.
I think committing too much up front to tech features or a checklist pushes you to later lose face by dropping the feature or including it at the expense of fun. You might have a very clear idea of what the game is upfront, and the result might be a great game, but you're not pushing boundaries.
Alexa Smart Home | Software Development Engineers | Seattle | ONSITE
We're focused on making Alexa the UI for the home and we're looking for engineers who want to help us in this mission. This is a unique opportunity to be an early member of a team whose work will have a big impact on customers. In order to achieve this mission, you'll get to build a wide variety of applications and services using a range of technologies.
Here are just a couple of the positions that I'm hiring for but please feel free to reach out to me (evan @ amazon . com) with any questions:
Alexa Smart Home | Software Development Engineer (all levels) | Seattle | ONSITE
We're focused on making Alexa the UI for the home and we're looking for engineers who want to help us in this mission. This is a unique opportunity to be an early member of a team whose work will have a big impact on customers. In order to achieve this mission, you'll get to build a wide variety of applications and services using a range of technologies.
Here are just a couple of the positions that I'm hiring for but please feel free to reach out to me (evan @ amazon . com) with any questions:
I would have liked to see Twitter become the product that Slack is now for many people: great direct message and group message capabilities, fun interface, great API for enabling bot integration, etc.
There will continue to be lots of examples of preserving the best of analog technology in the digital world.
One example is an app that I built that lets authors sign ebooks (Authorgraph: http://www.authorgraph.com). This idea was a result of doing more and more reading on my Kindle but missing the experience of meeting authors and having them sign my books.
Despite controlling about 40% of US online retail, Amazon only has about an 8% share of total US retail. There’s still plenty of room to grow here.
https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-will-surpass-40-of-...